


White Sand

by Morgan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 40
Words: 21,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7312537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morgan/pseuds/Morgan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Gates to Hell opened the second time no one saw it coming. Stephen Hill saw it as a perfect opportunity to find more beasts for his games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Rough concrete and cold iron bars. The walkways are just wide enough that no one can reach across, for good reasons. Lots of killers down here.

That’s what The Sands is all about.

They call the tall one Tiger. That’s the other one’s fault. They have had names for the other one too. Pretty and Killer and all the predictable slurs. None of it stuck. There’s a sneer on his face that mocks them twice as hard as any words could. It’s not until one of the announcers calls him Heathen that something happens to that sneer. His face hardens even further and his eyes go so cold that it just sticks, fits like the hilt of the knife he’s holding fits in his hand. Even the third row can feel the chill coming off him. And suddenly he’s Heathen every night.

They fight so viciously, so competently, that word spreads.

Tiger fights like he hates it and Heathen fights like he loves it, and they both stay alive for much longer than anyone else that gets processed for the sand. It’s uncanny how good they are, having been just grabbed off the street in the chaos after The Gates opened.

Stephen Hill owns and operates The Arena and his henchmen are too many and too well-trained to ever go anywhere near the cages or the fighters or the beasts, no matter how tempting. The first time one of them breaks protocol and gets a little too friendly with Heathen, the guy gets dead in three seconds flat. Heathen tears out the guard’s windpipe with his bare hands despite the nightstick and the cattle prod and there’s nothing anyone has time do about it.

They chastise him for that, and he doesn’t have a match for over two weeks.

There are rumors. There are always rumors in a place like this, half zoo, half prison. Nothing is ever really verified, because nothing is every really true or untrue. The barkers make them sound like wild men from the jungles of Borneo, like Black Ops specialists from the governments most secret organizations. The fact of the matter is that no one, not even Hill himself, knows who they really are, where they really come from. They’ve tried asking, but Tiger only turns his head away and Heathen either tells them a new lie or tells them to go fuck themselves.

The only thing they know for sure is that if you mess with one of them it will cost you. That isn’t a rumor. They’re surprisingly resourceful.

They’re kept down in the lower level with the rest of the animals because they tried it the other way first, but there were too many picked locks and broken bones and broken necks until Hill figured out that drugs and threats and the promise of bribes and basic creature comforts just don’t work with these two.

Threatening one to keep the other in line… that is a little more effective.

When Heathen misbehaved they whipped Tiger instead.

Heathen threw himself at the bars of his cage until the guard with the whip swore he heard a bone crack. 


	2. Chapter 2

There are Horses and dogs and werewolf spawn and all the rest of it, every horror, every bad thing they’ve ever fought and it’s like Hell sometimes, it’s like the Pit. There were cages there too.

They’re still alive. A lot of blood’s been spilled in the dirt in the Arena proper and that’s the way of it, that’s what the sand is for. That’s why the sand is white.

-Hey.   
-Yeah?   
-Remember that chili in that little place off the I-80 outside Cheyenne?   
-You crack your head?

There’s a long moment of silence.

-... little bit, maybe.   
- _Shut the fuck up back there!_  
-Go to Hell!

That last from the both of them in perfect unison makes the guard turn and walk away.

They’re supposed to be quiet. They’re supposed to be a lot of things, but Dean’s really hurting and Sam is so frustrated he could spit right now. They won’t let him near enough to Dean to check his wounds and he doesn’t like the way his brother is breathing. He can actually hear it, for one. It’s unsettling.

-What was the fight?   
-White bread.   
-Cracked your head for that?   
-It was vanilla. Walk in the park. Duck soup. Easy as pie… awh, fuck, now I’m hungry. Are you hungry?   
-Yeah, for like five months now.

Dean looks at Sam through the bars and Sam smiles at him, because that he can do. They use sign language figuring there’s not going to be much surveillance. Dean’s got maybe a couple of badly bruised ribs, cut on his head and busted capillaries that make him look really, really messed up. He signs that he’s okay. Trick is to buy yourself a couple of days and not get too fucked up to still walk.

-We had it better in prison, Dean says. “Three square, blankets for the cold.”   
-Only people trying to kill us. And, okay, one ghost.   
-Good times, Dean says and his voice is drifting.   
-Hey. Hey, hey, Duck Soup. You concussed or just fucked up?   
-These days? Hard to tell, man.

They laugh. They get told to shut up. They tell the guard to go to hell.   
Second verse same as the first. 


	3. Chapter 3

Two and two. That’s the way this goes.

The walk from the cages to the sands is long. There’s muscle at their back whenever they get taken up or brought back down.

Fewer fights now, but more intense.

Dean fucking hates it.   
And he hates that he doesn’t hate it as much as he should.

He told Sammy once that he was good at what he did in the Pit. He’s worked on shoving that down to the very base of his consciousness and doesn’t let any thoughts of how good he was with a blade, how much he enjoyed it, filter through.

He’s been pushing that back and back and down and down. Now, when he steps into the light and heat of the arena he has to let it all come back up, out into the bright fluorescence. He has to because that’s how they stay alive.

Lately there’s been a lot of double features. The bastard who owns this, who makes his money off their pain, figured it out.

Put Dean in the ring and he’ll kill whatever they stick in front of him.   
Put Sam in the ring and he’ll do what he has to, sure.   
Put them both in? That’s when you get a show.

It’s not undeserved, the reputation they have, the word of mouth they’ve acquired.

Dean lost his knife in the belly of some black dog beast, stuck it in so far he couldn’t get it loose, turned around and saw Sam getting taken down by the other one, and then there was only fear, blinding rage, the understanding that Dean might have to watch Sam bleed out on the white sands… for someone’s viewing pleasure.

Dean doesn’t have a clear memory of how he got on top of the thing, but he remembers the reek of it, dead meat and the sour stench of evil. Broke that thing’s neck and then he was all over Sam, touching every part of him, deaf to the roar of the crowd, just his own hands on Sam’s throat, chest. Covered in gore. Leaning in to listen at Sam’s lips when he couldn’t tell his own pounding heartbeat from the pulse he was searching so desperately for. A ripple through the crowd, then. A moment of odd suspense and he figured it out later. They thought he was going to kiss Sam, there, bloodied on the sands, a thousand eyes on them. For a strange, stupid moment when Sam’s breath trickled out across his skin, Dean wanted to. To breathe for Sam if he didn’t breathe for himself. To drag him back if he had to. To keep him alive, to make him live. To keep him.

The crowd, the owner, the handlers, the muscle? They are all waiting to see what’s going to happen next.

And here they are. In the light. Sweating already. Breathing. Alive. When the door at the other end of the circle opens Dean lifts his head and smiles. He lets it all show, the barely leashed violence, the tight control, the anger, the apprehensive anticipation and the fear. By his side Sam shifts into a fighting stance, lifts his head …and growls.


	4. Chapter 4

_And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain,_   
_don't carry the world upon your shoulders._   
_For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool_   
_by making his world a little colder…_

Dean’s hums in a low, smooth rumble, barely there over the din of everyday in the pen. Sam hears him perfectly. He’s laying with his head pressed to Dean’s chest, ribcage vibrating under his ear. Sam’s been beat up bad this time, but then so has Dean. Dean’s got a long gash on his leg that needs to heal.

It’s cold down here. He tells Dean it’s cold. Dean just hums and tightens his arms around Sam, rubs a hand down Sam’s flank.

It’s cold because it’s probably winter out there and there’s no heating. It’s a little dank too, no heat means it’s never really dry.

Sam thinks the guards assume they punished him and Dean by stuffing him in Dean’s cage. Not a lot of room to move. Monsters all around. Maybe they’re rewarding them. Close and together feels like a reward. Maybe they’re trying to figure them out. Maybe they think they’re going to have an easier time controlling them if they first give them this and then threaten to take it away.

Dean hums.   
Sam shivers.   
Dean hums some more.

Under the thud of shoes and the scraping noises of claws from the thing in the cage next to theirs – that thing’s been staring at them for three days straight – Sam kind of wants it dead - Dean’s still singing. And to the melody Sam knows like he knows the beating of his brother’s heart, Dean sings guard rotations, weak spots, weapons, how it all fits together.

Sam raises his head at some point, looks Dean in the eyes. They hardly talk anymore.

It’s different.

It’s starting to scare Sam a little how much of Heathen he can see in his brother, weaving in and around the boundless, endless care his big brother has always shown him. Dean breaks off his low singing, pushes a hand through Sam’s hair.

It’s like Sam is eight again.

-They want a show, Tiger, Dean says.   
-I want to kill ‘em all, Sam murmurs.

They’re not the same as they were when they came here. It’s been too long. They’ve taken too many beatings. Killed too much. There’s too much evil here, and too many people who enjoy it. They’ve seen demon black eyes. They fought a snake-thing that spat venom at Sam and took a chunk out of Dean.

If they stay here they’re going to die. Sam’s eyes feel hot. He shivers. Dean uses the hand he’s left at the back of Sam’s head to gently coax him back down.

-You rest now. You rest, little brother, Dean says so low no one else can hear him and then he starts singing again. 


	5. Chapter 5

You have to put aside a part of your humanity to survive. You have to be able to disconnect the thing that is made of compassion, the part of yourself that makes it so that leaving something to bleed that is too broken to walk matters to you. Dean has too much experience with what it’s like to feel nothing, he knows how slippery that slope is, knows that the nothing isn’t really the absence of emotions, but just a void where your emotions should go. It will all flood back in sooner or later.

He’s not proud of what he was in the Pit. He’s not proud of what Alastair made of him. He’s not proud of the fact that he lived to make Alastair proud some days when all he could see was red, all he could live was hate and fear.

He’s not like that now and that’s all because of Sam.

Dean is not Heathen, he knows that, just like he wasn’t Pet with Alastair. The way that works out in his head, though, is as different as stars from the flecks of broken glass on the floor. He feels too fiercely for Sam, fears for him, hurts for him, hopes for him.

He doesn’t know what he would do if this took Sam from him, if he had to watch that. Figures it wouldn’t be anything good. Figures there would be a lot of red on the sand, if that was ever to happen.

Sam looks at him with a small crinkle of a smile and moves in to sit close, shoulder to shoulder, hands over one bowl of stew to Dean. Five o’clock feeding in the tiger cage. No utensils. Everything is a weapon if you hold it right. The guards figured that out after Sam gutted one of them with a spoon.

Sam’s shoulder against his is solid. Watching Sam raise the bowl to his lips and slowly sip at the food is kind of funny. He eats neatly, almost dainty.

Tiger…Tiger with his tiger tongue rasping at a freshly downed deer, licking at the blood of the killing bite. Sam with blood on his face, demon blood and human carcass, but there’s still something to the image Dean is having too little trouble with right now. Dean thinks it’s the cages and the pit and the way Sam smells like something wild, washed in cold water only and with his hair still a little damp.

They really do need to get out of here. Dean mimics the way Sam’s eating and he’s just as neat.

-What do you think they’re feeding us, Tiger? Dean asks.

Sam slants a glance at him.

-Can’t tell if this is the reward-stew or the punishment-stew.   
-Means we’ve been here too long. It’s all the same old stew heated over.

What Dean wouldn’t give for a beer. A cheeseburger. A piece of pie. Some simple things, some good simple things. If those even exist anymore.

Still, at least he has Tiger’s shoulder pressed tight against his own and food in his belly. Could be worse.


	6. Chapter 6

The guards fear Heathen.

They’re fascinated by him too.

They watch him care for Tiger with sure, tender touches. They watch him put hands on Tiger in ways they can’t figure out. Too close for comrades in arms, not close enough for lovers. Too close for anything other than, or both and neither. It doesn’t make sense.

They kill for each other without blinking. They protect each other so fiercely that the shared history is palpable there in the space between them, in the way they move together. They bicker the way people who live in each other’s pockets do.

And when Tiger’s had a fever for two days and all Heathen does is watch him, ceaselessly, the guards put them in one cage together.

Heathen is careful in his approach, but steady. Tiger’s been fighting anyone who tries to touch him, even to medicate, because the snake venom means he’s hurting, everything is painful, every least little touch. It’s giving him hallucinations, fever, nightmares, daymares. The guards stand well back and watch because it’s mesmerizing and because they think they’re going to figure this thing with them out.

Heathen kneels close by, hands in fists on his own thighs. His whole body oriented towards Tiger where he lays curled in a protective huddle. There’s a soft sound from Heathen, then, a low hum, and it’s familiar. He keeps it up for long enough that Tiger’s body slowly starts to unfurl towards him, murmuring words that no one understands.

It is fascinating in the same way that watching wild life documentaries is fascinating. It’s arresting seeing these two deadly creatures care for each other. It can almost fool a spectator into thinking that those gentle touches could be transferred to other skin, to anyone’s skin. But then you have to remember what a sharpened spoon looks like when it is shoved into someone’s small intestine. You have to recall the sound of a broken neck, the spattered gore of a torn out windpipe.

These wild creatures are not like the spiked venomous thing one cage over in who’s eyes only cold death glitters constantly. They are nothing like the reined in madness of a full moon were, or the complete insanity of a demon ridden body.

They are worse.

There is clear and competent intelligence at work behind Tiger’s eyes even when he is pale from fever. There is sly clever charm at work in Heathen’s smile as he says “please” and “thank you”.

That is what makes them so dangerous.

“Are you not entertained?!” Heathen screams out one night as the crowd suddenly is struck dumb when he stands over the corpse of the bear creature he killed. It takes only seconds for the answering roar from the crowd to become deafening.


	7. Chapter 7

There’s more than one kind of violence on the sand.

There’s blunt and sharp battle, but there is more. For the crowd it’s something that happens rarely enough that they get an extra thrill from it.

It really isn’t about sex. Dean knows that better than most anyone. To the victor goes the spoils. To the victorious, the most vicious, goes the right to do with a defeated challenger anything they please. He had that in the Pit too. There is very little that can be done to the flesh that he has not experienced in one way and then the other.

They are slaves for all intents and purposes. Every creature dragged in here and tossed onto the sand is a slave. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mindless beast or more human, werewolf, “dogboys”, vampires, though those are rare. Any- and everything can be caught and cast in here. Sam tried reasoning with a Shifter in the early days, but the bloodlust is laid down deeper with the things that have always been running and fighting for survival. Sam and Dean know that feeling.

They have had their gladiatorial moments. Dean made Sam laugh, quoting Maximus and then made him remember how serious this is with his cold comment “ _damnatio ad bestias_ ” when he looked out over the cages.

There are things that can fuck you up and things that want to fuck you. There are things that want to stick it to you any way they can, especially when they smell fear and adrenaline. There is fear and adrenaline soaked into the sands, into the walls, into the plush seats in the high galleries. Dean can smell it on himself, on his brother, and every fight they have they get a little more saturated.

-How long? Dean asks one night.   
-Too long, Sam tells him.   
-You’re better at time than me. Five months? Six?   
-Six months, two weeks, three days.

The crowd wants them all the time now.

Hill is smart. Hill rations them out, cuts their number of performances, makes them exclusive. Hill is waiting for the day when one of them slips up, or when they start having less of a draw and then he will put them onto the sand, just the two of them, and pit them against each other.

It’s only a matter of time.

“They want a performance”, Dean tells Sam.

Sam is thinking that they’re going to give them one. He has to be ready for the time when it will be all on him to make sure that Dean knows there is nothing he can do for which Sam would condemn him. Not here, not now.

Violence on the sand. Violence and bright lights and bright death. He doesn’t care what kind of performance it takes. They won’t go down like that. Sam won’t let that happen.

 


	8. Chapter 8

It shouldn’t surprise anyone when Heathen picks a fight with the guards. It shouldn’t, but it still does. He charms them with that smile, with his attitude, with his complacency. He even charms them with his bloodlust, for all of how wrong that is.

Heathen has been brought back bloody and beaten and bruised and cut up and as long as no one tried to fuck with him, or fuck him, or fuck with Tiger, or fuck Tiger, he is all smiles and thank you and buddy.

So they get lulled.

They shouldn’t.

But they do.

Heathen is a spitfire and firecracker and all charm when he wants to be, even when his blood is dripping onto the concrete of the walkway and he has to be carried and dragged more than led back.

Guards are rotated often enough, exchanged often enough, that the ones to have seen the handle of a spoon stick out of a belly, or heard the breaking of a neck, forget or get replaced. The one with the whip was put on the sand himself for messing up on the job. The one that heard the cracking of a rib simply didn’t turn up for work the next day. The sadistic bastard who liked poking the animals in the cages with his cattle prod forgot why there is a yellow line painted about an arm’s length from the bars. The one that kept hissing vile things about what he wanted to do to Tiger’s fine tight ass forgot that you have to check twice that Heathen hasn’t kept any weapons on him after a fight.

There are five of them leading Heathen back from the rough and ready medical bay in the holding area just outside the sands. He is limping a little, shuffling along, casting sidelong glances at the doors they pass. Nothing to see there, not really. It’s an old arena, the doors could be exits, but all the locks are soldered shut.

Heathen is all fierce instinct coupled with so much experience that a guard of five is an insult, even when he’s limping, broken, tired.

All weapons have been accounted for after they put him down with a Taser - neuromuscular incapacitation. One knife gone unnoticed from a guard’s pocket. One piece of flat plastic. One piece of chord gone missing from a headset. Small things, and inconsequential, except for the knife.

He gets tossed into the cage while they point their weapons at Tiger who paces the far end like his namesake, an unreliable gleam in his eyes and too much tension in his muscles like he might just try, no matter how many black muzzles are lining up on him. Once Heathen is on the ground there’s no stopping him and the cage door slams shut, buzzes when the lock hits and then they stand well back and curse and watch. Tiger’s on his knees by Heathen’s side, one hand placed carefully on his neck, right over where his pulse beats. He doesn’t say a word.

It’s when Heathen’s eyes crack open and a small smile catches on his lips that they all know he’s still alive, still kicking, still fighting.

They’re relieved when there’s proof of life. There’s the income to consider and there would be hell to pay if a fighter was permanently damaged with no paying punters to witness it.   
There’s also the fact that, even caged, Tiger’s a scary bastard with a long memory.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam remembers all the people he has killed for Dean, all the people Dean has killed for him. He remembers, even if some things are hazy, like dates and towns and places on the map. It’s been a long road.

Creatures are not the same. This is where they let themselves off the leash. Sam has always been bad at keeping it together when it comes to Dean being in danger. It got worse after that thing in Florida, sure, but it’s always been pretty bad. He just doesn’t like when Dean gets hurt.

It’s stupid, and he knows that, because the way they live, the way they’ve always lived, has never exactly been safe, but that doesn’t mean Sam ever learned to accept any of it. It’s not okay when Dean gets hurt. It’s not indifferent to see him in pain, no matter how good he is at handling it.

Sam just doesn’t like it.

On top of rich assholes and monsters, Sam also has to worry about the guards. They’re mostly big, burly guys, ex-military, paramilitary, mercenary, bouncer types… all neck and boots and weapons. There are glimmers of intelligence, but they’re not worth much in Sam’s eyes, because if any of them had a real half of a brain they should have figured out that you don’t poke the things in the cages with a stick – even if it has high voltage.

The kind of hatred Sam feels for them is based mostly on the fact that they’re assholes and completely morally defunct. They’re only in it for the money and whatever casual sadistic pleasure they get out of beating the … inmates, slaves, meat, collateral, whatever-the-hell they think they’ve got here.

Sam saw the Shifter three cages down the other day that had got both arms broken in a fight and was still trying to keep it together. He has more respect for that than the assholes with their Glocks and whips and cattle prods.

There was one guard, Sam took to thinking of him as Potato because of his nose, that took a special shine to Dean. Potato was a little too fond of getting up close and personal with Dean when he got hurt or knocked out, had to be carried back.

Sam saw Potato put liberal hands on Dean, feeling him up when Dean was still too out of it to do anything, his head rolling so loosely that it looked like his neck was broken. Big, fat hands all over Dean’s back and ass and Sam felt the impotent rage of being locked in across from Dean more than usual, because all he could do was growl as the others laughed at the way the merchandise was being handled.

Still… it wasn’t until Dean woke from a flashback nightmare of hell after that guy touched him that Sam shivved Potato with a spoon.

Potato was a person. It doesn’t matter to Sam anymore.   
Fucker had it coming.   
So does the rest of them.


	10. Chapter 10

She’s been here eight times in total. It’s exhilarating, the rush of the fights, the blood, the creatures… so many creatures she had never even dreamed existed before she came here. Some have spikes and some have teeth and some look perfectly normal, if a little rough. There is a low exited building thrum of energy before the fights when they have cocktails in the bar before the main event.

Every time she has been here she’s gone home so turned on, so wet and worked up that she has had to use her domestics just to get some relief. It’s inconvenient, she’s had to fire three of them so far because once she’s had them they start thinking they can take liberties. She doesn’t want to have to keep doing that just because she needs a good hard fuck.

The idea springs to mind that she could probably get one of the gladiators for the night and she finds herself taking inventory of the fighters. They are frankly a little too brutish for her tastes, or not human enough, or just not attractive enough… that is until the night she is there, champagne in hand, watching as the fighters are introduced and in a moment of perfect cinematic slowness a young, golden god of a man walks out into the arena as relaxed and at home as if he was out for a leisurely stroll in a garden.

She watches, champagne forgotten, going flat and warm, as the young man kills a huge beast of a thing with a wickedly curved scythe-like weapon and before the body of the beast is even flat on the ground she is up and moving, going in search of that odious little man Hill, who owns the establishment. He smiles and flatters and simpers until she makes her request and then his face falls.

-I’m afraid that is not possible. Perhaps one of my other…

But she doesn’t want another. She wants that one. She offers Hill more money, it’s not only the Kennedy clan that has bank, but he still refuses. She is about to lose her temper when Hill holds up a hand to her and indicates that she should take a walk with him. They wind up in a control room of sorts where several monitors show live surveillance footage.

-Senator, you have to understand that there are some creatures that are too dangerous to be let off the leash like that. I wouldn’t be able to guarantee your safety.

She looks at the screen he indicates and watches as the young man gets shoved into what looks like a cross between a prison cell and one of those cages at the zoo where they keep the big game. The young man is naked from the waist up, a shallow gash is bleeding freely down his side, but she can see that he is grinning, still worked up from the fight. She thinks that Hill is talking nonsense, she’s sure the young man wouldn’t mind working off some of that energy with her.

She is about to turn back to Hill and snap at him when she sees a shadow move at the edge of the screen, dissolving into another young man, this one dark where her choice was fair. He approaches slowly and she can see the gentleness of the touch as he presses a scrap of fabric to the wound. His lips are moving, but there’s no sound so the words are lost. Just as she thinks this is nonsense, the fair one puts his hand on the back of the neck of the dark one and rests their foreheads together.

Oh, how delicious. There are two of them.


	11. Chapter 11

Dean levels a gaze at him in the cage one night that’s so intense it almost makes Sam take a step back. There’s an emotion there that Sam does not even have a name for. Sam’s unharmed. Dean’s blood spattered.

Dean stalks over to him and puts his hand on Sam’s neck, brings their foreheads together. That strange hush comes over the whole pen, a held breath, an anticipation.

-What do you think Oprah’s doing right now? Dean asks.

Surprised laughter startles out of Sam. He raises his head a little and looks into Dean’s eyes. There’s thinly veiled madness there, covered by nothing more than a thin layer of frost. Dean’s too wild and too lost to the fight right now. He’s running too hot, his blood pumping too hard and Sam should try to soothe him, talk him down, but instead he feels his own blood heat and he wants to fan this fire, not put it out.

-You think she needs to go the way of the fabric softener teddy?   
-No way she’s not made a deal, man. Her and Regis both.

They’re still there, standing in the middle of the goddamned cage, Dean’s hand hot and heavy on Sam’s neck and the brilliance of a sunrise in his brother’s eyes, something that is a little too much like complete insanity and still too cunning to be Dean losing it.

-Did I ever tell you how good I am? Dean asks and his voice has dipped down low and confidential.

It does strange things to Sam hearing him like this, feeling Dean’s breath on his skin and getting the stink of sweat and blood and battle to go with it.

-How good are you? Sam asks instead of turning that away, turning it into something more innocuous.   
-I was forged anew, Dean says and between one breath and the next he tucks a length of stripped copper wire into the waistband of Sam’s jeans.

The skin on skin contact, Dean’s knuckles against Sam’s stomach, jolts Sam back to where he should be and the madness of the moment downgrades and settles into a background hum.

The metal heats against Sam’s skin and he stays right where he is, locked into Dean’s gaze. It’s like looking into the eyes of an animal, or a very young child. There’s awareness there, but no avoidance, no shields.

Sam has a moment of thinking that Dean must have been terrible in hell. He must have been the kind of thing that even demons fear. He must have been glorious and broken and completely fucked up and so, so terrifying, because Dean can go down in a crush of five guards trying to beat the crap out of him and still come up grinning and armed.

-You are very good, Sam says.   
-Yes, I am, Dean agrees.


	12. Chapter 12

-Don’t say you’re fine, _don’t_. You say you’re fine I’m going to kick your ass. Did she bleed on you?   
-No. I’m… no, it’s mine.

Sam is holding on too hard. Dean tries pushing him off, ribs aching and his hand cut in a neat slice right down the palm, no goddamned pummel on the goddamned blade and he sliced the head clean off before the gore made his hand slide too far with the motion and he’s cut, he’s just a little cut up. It’s fine.

Sam is not fine.   
Sam is speaking in that too soft voice, calm before the storm and he’s angry, scared, pissed as all hell and his eyes are a wild dark storm.

-If she bled on you…  
-No. _No_. She was dead before I got cut. I took her head clean off.

Clumsy, but still moving, Dean is looking around for the other one, the one Sam took care of. The crowd is wild, cheering, screaming. Sam is standing on Dean’s toes, leaning in to be heard over the noise, frantic and worried. Sam like this is a thing of beauty, but he is more than a little crazy right now and the gate is banging open again. Dean’s head snaps up, eyes going wide.

They’re putting another two on the sand.

These are moving differently, smoother, more like a well-oiled machine and Sam takes one look at Dean’s face and then wheels around just as the pair fall into a well timed attack that makes Dean want to scream with frustration.

Things happen so fast after that. Sam tears a strip off his shirt and hands it to Dean as he takes two steps forward to stand just in front of him while Dean awkwardly wraps his hand so he can get some kind of grip. There’s blood in the air and there are teeth coming at them and Sam is moving like a ripple in water, smooth and silken and focused.

Vampires are so fast. They have Sam corralled in between them in the blink of an eye, but by then Dean is wrapped and ready and already moving. He hits a bone on the first swing he takes at the one at Sam’s back and has to put his boot in the things spine to get his blade lose before swinging again. It’s not an elegant kill, more of a hack-and-slash, but Dean’s muscles are exhausted and he’s bleeding and his ribs hurt.

When Dean turns his head to see what it is that has the crowd hissing, there’s a spectacle awaiting. Sam has obviously taken a swing, but the vampire must have reared back at the precise wrong moment. Sam has sliced half its jaw off, upper teeth still intact and the look on its face angry more than anything. The noises are disgusting, and the crowd is fucking eating it up.

They kill it together, in tandem, giving a show. Hoping that’s enough for tonight.

Later in the cage, Sam helps Dean wash down with quickly blessed water and looks like he wants to kill something, pray or throw up. Dean traces along his bruised ribs and knows exactly how Sam feels. 


	13. Chapter 13

The first time Mike heard about monsters he shook his head and laughed, but Walter said there was money to make and things had already gone to shit in a way that no one could have predicted, so Mike went to the interview. That was a bizarre hour.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that his wife was out of a job and money was getting real tight he would have walked out on the smarmy suit the minute he started talking about the “glorious days of the gladiatorial games”. Mike’s seen some pretty bad shit, but this was a new one. At first he thinks it’s some kind of fucked up version of the MMA. First time he sees someone go hairy all over he figures it’s not.

So, yeah, there are monsters in the world. Doesn’t seem so bad, thinking about it like they’re doing a public service, keeping those off the streets. Mike just goes with it, fat bundle of bills in his pocket and new, shiny shoes. It’s not ideal, but at least there’s food on the table. He tries not to think about the fact that when they scream, most of the monsters sound a lot like people.

Underground there’s a kind of prison. It takes a couple of weeks for him to get rotated to that duty. Figures that’s probably smart. It’s smells like a monkey house and there are things down there that make the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He listens to the safety regulations with a lot more care that the guy he’s with. “Don’t step over the line” and “don’t listen to them” and “watch out for that one… it’s prickly”.

Then there’s the cage that doesn’t make any damned sense at all. There’s two guys in there. They look like regular guys. One of them looks over at him and the other newbie and gives a polite nod. His companion just watches them unwaveringly, coldly assessing. Otis, the old hand giving the tour, catches Mike’s surprised expression.

-What are they? Mike asks in a low tone when Otis stops in front of the bars with his toes right on the yellow line.   
-Don’t let the pretty boy fool you. They’re bad news, he says and Mike notices the way his hand strays to the stunner on his belt.   
-At least we’re not walking proof it’s a bad idea to marry your sister, says the one who greeted them.   
-Shut the hell up, Heathen, unless you want a little something extra in your feed, Otis spits out with enough rancor that Mike can tell there’s history there and then turns to keep them moving.

It’s some weeks later and Mike can’t shake the feeling that he shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this. It’s got nothing to do with him not being tough enough, or mean enough. He just can’t get those two out of his head, and it’s starting to keep him up nights. No money is worth that. He never bothers giving notice when he quits. He’s smart enough to know that by then he’s already seen too much to be allowed to just walk away, so he packs up the car and takes Stella to go live with her sister for a while. Things will be better in Wyoming.

-We’re people, the guy had told him when they dragged him back down to the cages one night. “We’re just people.”

Mike had looked into the guy’s eyes and figured there were enough monsters in the world without him letting himself become one of them. 


	14. Chapter 14

Sam watches Dean’s thousand yard stare. He’s gone so far away from where he’s sitting that Sam feels the sudden need to reach out and touch him just to make sure he’s still there. It’s not hard to recognize the posture. Dean’s thinking about things that he shouldn’t be thinking about, but the problem with being here is that there’s a lot of boredom in between the bouts of brutal scare-your-pants-off terror.

Sam wants to say “come back to me” but it doesn’t work that way.

He lets Dean sit with his back to the bars and his gaze slowly roving over everything that moves and everything that doesn’t and it looks like he’s meditating, only not all the way as peaceful as that. Sam lets him sit until he just can’t take it anymore.

He means to say something, something easy, a road game, I-spy, anything, but the words just won’t come. Lips sown together by distance and disbelief and there’s no way they should still be here. Why are they still here? They should have been able to break out of here easy. They broke out of prison and that was tougher than this. Sam can feel his throat closing up, breathing going reedy, his heart stuttering in his chest, jumping beats and impossible wrong footed syncopation. He doesn’t even mean to but he’s about to start hyperventilating and his brother’s name just tumbles off his lips. It sounds strange and wild with Sam’s panic behind it.

Sam’s hands have closed into fists and he’s curled down over his own knees and then Dean’s there, Dean’s hands are on him, holding him together, flat palm on his shoulder blade and Dean saying “hey, hey, calm down” as if that’s even an option. Sam tries. He does as Dean says, breathes when Dean breathes. Focuses on the hands on his chest and shoulder, Dean’s warmth and the smell of him, his exhalations on Sam’s skin.

He’s a little more with it when he realizes he has his forehead resting against Dean’s blunt jawbone and Dean’s crouching so close they’re in a huddle.

-Say my name, Sam fumbles out.

He hasn’t heard it in so long he doesn’t even know who he is right now. Doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to be.

Dean is solid against him, sharp and real and sweat-tacky. Dean’s hands are scarred and his thoughts are loud and his mouth is sliding lower, closer to Sam’s ear.

It’s long moments and cold air and nothing but the two of them in this godforsaken place where there are monsters all around and some sick fuck has turned them into something they never should have been in the first place, something that they maybe were all along, only under the guise of doing right. They’ve been exposed as killers here, and good ones at that, and Sam can’t handle it right now. He wants to be out of here so badly the walls are pressing in and the only thing that’s keeping him from splintering is Dean.

Dean slows his hands, grabs on to Sam and holds him.

-Sam, he says, low and close, just between the two of them. “Sammy.”


	15. Chapter 15

The kid can’t be out of his teens and he’s laying on his back, legs spread, chin tilted up to show his throat. Sam put the bitch down, a more seasoned fighter who had gone straight for the kill. This kid, though, this kid kept swinging wild at Dean, trying to punch him and missing by a mile. This kid is no fighter.

The crowd is caught up in it, chanting.

Dean looks at his brother, then back down at the kid. It’s so inherently wrong killing the little runt that Dean remembers himself for a moment. It could be the look in his eyes, completely defeated, perfect capitulation. It could be the UCLA t-shirt he’s got on, Dean doesn’t even know. It would be more of a mercy to break his neck and be done with it, but Dean just can’t.

Memories of being helpless and badly outclassed have twisted something in Dean.

This would be like finishing off a dog hit by a car … “don’t look, Sammy, don’t look”.

Dean folds down onto his knees, straddling slim hips. He leans in and puts his teeth over the jugular and bites down. He can feel the corresponding whine more than he can hear it over the crowd. The kid is spreading himself out wider, muscles completely loose and his head so far back Dean feels the skin stretch under his mouth until he lets go. He murmurs in the kid’s ear “do you want to live?” and he doesn’t think about what he is going to do when the kid nods. Because the kid will. Everything wants to live.

He turns the kid over, gets his jeans down.

Dean thinks about how bad all this is for about a second and then spits in his hand, wants to make things that little bit easier. He can do this, he’s done this before, only in front of a very different crowd.

Dean can feel eyes on him, but the only pair that matters are Sam’s and he looks up, looks around, is going to tell his brother “don’t look, Sammy, don’t look”.

Dean expects disgust on his brother’s face, indignation. He is in no way ready for how Sam is striding, already by his side before he even has time to flinch. Sam’s eyes are lit and Dean can swear there’s a growl building in his throat to match the set of his features, a wild sneer. Dean has the kid’s hips in his hands and he’s already gearing up to work himself in and the crowd is chanting, heavy and rhythmic, and Sam is sinking to his knees so close Dean can feel the heat pouring off him.

Instead of looking away, Sam locks his gaze with Dean’s and then reaches over, putting a hand on the kid’s neck, keeping him where he is, head down, ass up and then he breaks every goddamned rule there is, leaning in and grabbing a fist full of Dean’s t-shirt right over his heart.

-Do it, Sam tells him. “Come on.”

It’s just another kind of violence. It’s just another thing Dean has to get through. That’s not what makes his heart bang around in his chest. That has everything to do with the way Sam doesn’t break the contact the whole time Dean is fucking the boy into submission.


	16. Chapter 16

Treat a man like a beast long enough and he will start turning into one.

Sam thinks they’ve slid down the slippery slope a little faster than most because they understand violence, him and his brother.

They understand brutality and they know about the kinds of beasts that are out there, supernatural and otherwise. They’ve been steeped in that sort of thing since the day they were born and that’s a part of the reason why, but it’s not the whole of it. He thinks that some of the things he sees in his brother’s eyes these days are things Dean learned in hell. He thinks about that roadside confession, the way Dean explained how he’s never going to be able to tell Sam about it, how it isn’t something you can convey or understand or forgive yourself for.

Then he thinks about how easily they slid into killing the things they get pitted against and how quickly he learned to abstract himself from the noise of the arena, the smell of it. He thinks about that and he thinks about what Dean is capable of, what he himself is capable of and he’s scared, he is, by how fucking dangerous they’ve become. How easy it is.

It’s not like it matters when they’re still not being fed enough, or when Dean is being beaten for misconduct. There are simple rules to follow. The simpler the rules get, the more of their humanity they seem to forfeit. Survival dictates that they just get through each day, get through each new thing.

He learns to eat what’s put down for them. He learns to take care of all his bodily needs in the harsh glare of the cage’s lights. He learns to disassociate from the things that should have made him burn with shame. He thinks about ways and means and he thinks about a way out.

He relies on Dean.   
He leans on Dean.   
He never stops thinking that he and Dean are going to be the ones to put a stop to all this.

He knows that there is nothing Dean won’t do to keep them safe and in one piece.

The thing about them is that underneath it all they’re still irreverent, seriously high-spirited, dangerously hard to control and keep in a box. They’re going to survive and they’re going to get out. It’s just a matter of time.

Sam’s a little worried, occasionally, that whatever they are when they walk out of here, they’re never going to be the same again.

There’s no moral divide here. There’s only survival. That bothers Sam more than he’d like. It’s hard to live like that. It’s hard to be a killer and try to keep some kind of autonomy of thought.

-Hey, don’t get lost in there, Dean says and reaches over, tugging on a lock of Sam’s hair. 

Sam startles and then scowls, a low growl working its way out of his throat without his conscious permission. Dean’s eyes widen a fraction and for a second everything hangs in the balance as Sam realizes what he just did. The tension around them breaks and falls when Dean throws his head back and laughs.


	17. Chapter 17

They’re sparring when the guards come to drag Dean off. Dean thinks the looks on their faces are more than a little amusing. Sam’s told go to the back of the cage and then the big potbellied asshole signals for Dean to come forward. They cuff him, the process practiced in a way that makes Dean think that at least one or two of these guys have worked in prisons. He’s sweaty and a little out of breath, the cuffs clasped just tight enough to be uncomfortable.

The guards are antsy as fuck, keeping their distance and watching him warily. They’ve been nervous since The Incident. Dean cracks his neck and shakes himself out of thoughts about the equipment they carry that he could make much better use of.

He’s taken up to the ridiculously chrome-and-steel fitted office of the bastard Hill. Hill waves a hand at the guards after they’ve refastened the cuffs looped through the arms of the chair Dean’s been forcibly sat down in. Hill is posturing, walking slowly around his huge desk and perching on the end of it, looking down on Dean. His suit is tailored to make him seem more imposing, broader over the shoulders. As a boardroom tactic it might actually be pretty effective, but right here, right now, it just makes Dean sick of the whole charade. He already knows he’s not going to like a damned thing that comes next.

-After your performance the other night I’ve had quite a few requests for you, Hill says. 

Dean gives his smarmiest smile in answer.

His head is roaring. He wants nothing more than to put a fist in Hill’s face. He hasn’t been this close to the man in months and he’s been killing things with his bare hands on a fairly regular basis since. This just proves that no matter how bad things get they can always get just that little bit worse. It’s there in Hill’s answering smile. The look of a man holding all the cards and just waiting to lay them down. Hill has the moral compass of an opportunistic virus. If he was any slimier you could get rid off him with a bag of salt.

-Pay a bum to blow you, Dean advices without changing his demeanor.  
-Funny. Very funny, Hill says and then steps forward and backhands Dean across the face hard enough that his eyes water.

Dean has to take a second before he turns his face forward again. He tries not to think about what the noise of Hill’s neck snapping might sound like. It probably shows in his eyes anyway, because Hill steps away sits back down.

-We’re talking about just a few select clients. A senator. A businessman. A judge, Hill tells him.  
Dean takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.   
-If you do that, Dean tells him letting the words carry the weight of his conviction, “I’ll break the neck of every single person you put me in a room with.”   
-Okay. If you don’t want to do it, Hill says and there’s that damned smile again. “I’ll just give them Tiger instead.” 

Dean moves so fast Hill barely reaches his panic button. He folds his legs in under him, centers himself, grabs the armrests of the chair and pulls with the combined force of his arms and legs, snapping the chair into kindling and then he’s got Hill on his back on the desk with his throat in one hand and his balls in the other. 

-I will kill you, Dean promises before he gets put down by the guards storming through the door.


	18. Chapter 18

The quality of the fighters they get pitted against drops markedly all of a sudden.

It was two weres and two vamps and two something-that-had-talons and then there’s suddenly one dog-boy who was hardly more than a whelp and just regular gorillas. Not even the furry kind, just really big fucking guys, not that those aren’t all kinds of bothersome if for no other reason than the fact that Sam doesn’t like killing people. Or, he tries not to anyway.

Something’s changed. Something’s going on that isn’t good.

The Sands is … well, it’s not a Vegas show and it never really should try being one either. It’s a pit of blood and despair and Sam and Dean have been hanging on by the skin of their teeth for months thinking it will only get worse, like reaching the next level in any game. Instead the reverse is happening.

The crowd is still just as riled, just as hungry for blood and sport, but the fighters are so far from what they used to be that he and Dean actually shake their heads at the whole thing one night when they get tossed in with two guys carrying samurai swords. Carrying them like shovels, mind you, not like they had the first fucking clue what to do with them other than wave them around pointy end first.

It’s unsettling. Sam can’t put his finger on it, but it makes him more nervous than the alternative.

He figures it out later that night when he’s tending to a gash on Dean’s arm. Things are winding down. That can’t mean anything good for them.

Dean is watching his face as he works.

-Tell me what’s going on in that big brain of yours, Dean says when Sam can feel the frown settling heavy over his own brow.   
-You know how you never hear of retired greyhounds? he asks and makes eye contact briefly.   
-Yeah, yeah I know.

Dean gets it. They’re inching closer and closer to something they really don’t want. Dean reaches over and puts his hand on Sam’s neck, pulling him in. His breath is hot and moist against Sam’s ear.

-Time to go soon, little brother, he says softly.

The worst part about that is that Sam knows they’re going to have to do some terrible things to get out of here. These are not good people, but that’s not really the point. Dean shifts a little and rests their foreheads together. From that close Sam can’t get away from him. Not that it matters because Sam doesn’t even want to.

Whatever barriers they used to have they are blown clear away now. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to not be right by Dean’s side ever again. 


	19. Chapter 19

Boredom is as much of a killer as monsters.

Dean doesn’t think there are any worse monsters here than the ones running the show and watching it.

Boredom, though, is a bad, bad thing. It leaves him much too much time to think. He can’t get rid of the anxious itch under his skin except on the sands and then it’s life-or-death and that really is no way for things to be.

He can’t believe they are still here.

They won’t be for much longer, though, one way or the other.

They’ve been patient for so long. Dean’s been good. He’s not generally all that comfortable with this kind of patience, but there’s the other thing to consider here. Now, if it was just him, if it was just about Dean, he would have tried a long time ago, fast and sloppy. But there’s Sam, and after those first weeks, the sound of fists and leather hitting Sam’s skin, Dean sunk himself into the red and black of it, into the boredom between the fights and the heady adrenaline rush of the arena.

The objective then had just been to survive and get away. Escape, evade. But now, with everything that has been done to them, everything they have been forced to do, the objective has changed. Evade, yes. Escape, absolutely. But they’re going to eviscerate too. They’re going to give the Arena all the gore it can handle, the way a sliver of glass works its way through the small intestine and kills from within in a wash of blood.

Dean thinks about it all the time now, even when he’s in the harsh glare of sodium lights. He thinks about angles and trajectories, about how to appropriate a weapon and get through doors. He thinks about how he’s going to get all the way up to the top floor where Hill sleeps, the fucking idiot, and Dean is going to make an example out of him. _Damnatio ad bestias_ is not any less frightening just because you’re not in with the lions. Oh, no, the lions will come to him in the middle of the night.

Thinking about that makes things a little less boring.

Thinking about Sam makes things a little less boring too.

Sam with his hair flying wild because he’s got his window rolled down.   
Sam leaning in over his laptop, being smarter than he has any right to be.  
Sam looking up at him over the biggest hungry man’s breakfast they can find.

Yes, Sam, all long limbs and powerful grace concealed under a thin veneer of good boy manners and shy smiles, when Dean knows exactly what he is, how dangerous he is, how good he is in a fight.

Thinking about that makes things a little less boring and it doesn’t really bother Dean anymore that it stirs something else in him too, something primal and deeper than even their shared history. A bond forged by blood and killing and danger and a shared cage and Sam looking him in dead in the eyes, saying “do it, come on” with a fist full of Dean’s t-shirt in a solid grip.


	20. Chapter 20

Outside doesn’t exist anymore. That’s really depressing.

It’s not entirely academic, that statement. What Sam means is that he hasn’t seen the outside in a long time. He doesn’t know what the weather is like or if the season has turned, or what the news are lying about. He doesn’t know any of the thousand things that he and his brother have lost and missed and been deprived of. He’s a little scared of thinking about it because sometimes he thinks maybe it’s all gone. Maybe it’s all like this now, like the sands.

Sam thinks he might be going a little bit crazy. It’s not a big surprise.

It’s so strange. They are different now, so entirely different from what they have ever been before and still they are more like the children they once were when they ran wild as savages at Bobby’s between the rusting hulks of carcass cars. There’s so much blood now, so much violence. It’s brought them back so the wild whooping things they once were as if there are feathers in their hair and makeshift bows in their hands.

It’s not play, any of this, but it’s primal in the same way as those dusty days when their jeans were torn at the knees and their faces were war painted by dirt and sweat. They are back to those things and secret languages and secret hand signals and war, blood, paint all ancient instincts and trained violence and it’s like dancing, like fighting, like fucking.

Sam and his brother. Sam and his big brother.

Painted in bruises and marred by new scars and violent and dangerous down to the bone, more than they ever have been before. He thought he’d tasted the worst of it when Dean was in hell, away from him. He thought he’d reached a nadir then, with the blood and the knife edge of despair heavy over him all the time.

He was wrong.

And yet, this is still different. Dean said once that he could never talk about what happened to him. Sam had kind of resented that. He understands now, because once they leave here, and they will leave here, they are never going to be able to talk about this either. They have been acid etched and cleaned out and stripped down.

And Hill thinks he’s Caesar in all this. He forgets the Ides of March and the fact that Brutus stabbed Caesar in the junk. Things happen in darkened corridors. Things happen when there is intent and sweet long knives. Sam can think of a few things. Sam has been thinking of a few things.

Dean slides in next to him on their pallet and pushes Sam’s t-shirt up, writes on the skin of his back with a jagged fingernail while humming _You Are My Sunshine_.

Time   
To   
Go

And Sam shows teeth in the gloom.

 


	21. Chapter 21

About three in the morning the guards get sloppy. It’s predictable.

That’s when the plan is Pandemonium.

If it had been two in the afternoon the plan would have been The Great Escape. It they had been in the halls the plan would have been Hannibal.

Sam always figured it would end in Pandemonium with a twist of Salem thrown in.

The sneaky plans, the underhanded plans, the cunning plans, those were all for the first couple of months. Now, he and Dean are going to raze this place to the ground and salt the earth behind them.

The cages are sturdy things with electric locks. They go through a crack in one of the runner bars with a piece of metal and then short-circuit the locking mechanism. There are lines of salt and borders of silver and a thing of runes and herbs and those are all for the beasts. Nothing more needed for the humans, or so the guards seem to think.

There’s a gap between the top of the cages and the camera lined roof where all the dead angles are.

Sam and Dean go up.

Some of the things in the cages watch them, but no alarms are raised and not a single one of the creatures try to stop them, though a few probably could jump up and get a hold of a foot, pull one of them off balance. It’s a slow creep with careful footing. It’s a long way to the door.

The things in the cages watch in silence and then turn blind eyes. The door is anther iron monstrosity with another buzz-lock that must have been fitted in after this place was built. It’s as secure as a gate like that could be, but then Sam has a slim jimmy in his hand and he’s doing that thing he does, making the lock click and then using the copper wire to short it out too.

There’s a hallway. It’s empty now, at three a.m. Soon the guards will walk it, maybe look in on the beasts, bang on some cages, spout some abuse.

They ghost it to the end of the hall where there’s a space off to the right with a sloppily pushed too door that opens into a surveillance room where one guard is currently sitting in a half doze with his feet up on the desk. Dean breaks his neck without waking him. There’s no big bunch of keys on his belt, just a tag and a buzzer. Sam plucks the radio off him and slips the earpiece in. Dean picks the carcass clean of weapons. They stand there for a moment, looking at the wall of monitoring screens. Things asleep. Things in pain. Things twitching restlessly. All the cages. All the locked doors.

There’s a way up. A passageway. A narrow corridor.

Then there’s the break room.

Sam and Dean are barefoot. They haven’t had shoes in a while. They’re as noiseless as nightmares through the door. 

Then the screaming starts.

But it doesn’t last for long.


	22. Chapter 22

Back in the day this would have been “the job”. It would have been “working” or maybe “doing what they had to”.

It’s not that now.

He knows what this is.

They’re _hunting_.

They’ve always been hunters. That’s what dad called it, what Bobby called it. It’s the polite euphemism they’ve always used, like saying they’re going to gank something instead of naming the devil by his true name.

They’re hunting now, soft footed, in the dark, like things at dusk, in the witching hour. They’re ghosting down corridors. They’re slipping between shadows and bringing stark death.

They’re better at this than anyone else in the entire building.

Twenty minutes in the surveillance room and every camera is looped to an hour of “nothing to see here, officer”. Tazers, knives and garrotes, nothing that will make too much noise. Bodies in their wake.

And they’re hunting.  
Like tigers in the tall grass.

They’re fast and silent. They’re arrow and spearhead, one to draw and one to pounce. They’re not what the random night crew expect, docile and frightened of their tazers and nightsticks and the occasional gun. They’re padding on light feet, predator eyes on the swerve for movement. Everything about them honed to a fine grade after months of fighting for survival. No fat on their bones, no fear left in their hearts. They get out tonight or they die trying.

This place is like hell. They’re climbing up, like Orpheus, floor after floor.

And there are rooms they don’t go in to. There are locked doors everywhere, pass codes and swipe cards. Keys.

The difference between them and the rest of the things kept in cages is that they know how to open doors with picks and keys and cards and not make a sound as they glide up behind another guard ambling past to get himself more coffee from another break room.

Their hands are red by now.

Sam’s hair is longer than it’s ever been and he’s carrying two blades, one short, one long that looks like a parang. There’s blood dripping. It’s not his. Dean has a gunstock war club and tazers, a stick, a knife. He’s got a gun down the back of his jeans, but he doesn’t need it.

The Sands is noise and clamor and screams of pain. Now as they move from floor to floor they leave nothing behind but silence.


	23. Chapter 23

No matter how good security is there are always dead angles, secret rooms, hidden spaces. There are always blind spots.   
  
Five floors up is where the apartments are. There’s an office. Dean’s been in there. They go there first and Sam wipes his hands on his shirt before sitting down to wake the computer on the desk. He gives Dean an incredulous look. Dean walks over to glance over his shoulder. No password. That’s the kind of arrogance they’re dealing with, someone so absolutely sure of their superiority that they forgo basic security measures.

Dean puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder and squeezes once. Sam nods and goes to work. They don’t have much time. Or, they have all the time in the world, Dean’s not sure yet, but they’re erring on the side of caution.

There’s a safe too, one of those ugly grey things that look like a cross between a gun safe and a filing cabinet. Dean puts a hand to it and he just knows. There’s a little fiddling around with the locking mechanism, but it’s like his hearing is turned up to eleven. The handle turns for him and there are tidy bundles of money, more money than he’s ever seen in one place at one time.

Sam is working quietly with the kind of deadly focused rage burning in his eyes that makes Dean sure thousands will pay. And pay. And pay.

They spend some time in there, doing things that would shock the people who have been looking at him and his brother like nothing but brutes for months. Information gathering. Money going all over the place and into accounts that Sam conjures from thin air like magic.

The world still exists out there. A little dinged up and dented, but it’s not all gone. Not yet, anyway.

Thoughts of that later. Time for that later.

Sam slips a virus into the mainframe just as elegantly as he slipped a shiv into an abdominal cavity. Deadly things in Sam’s hands are a comfort to Dean now. Maybe it’s always been that way.

There’s a door at the end of the hall, another big sturdy locked metal monstrosity. They go through that with keys and cards and things of metal. There’s pair of body guards slumbering in the first room on the left. Those go in their sleep.

There’s a bedroom at the far left, in the corner. It has a huge skylight and a big bed drowned in soft pillows and silk. A surprisingly small mound in the middle is the beating breathing heart of all this sordid violence and mayhem and death.   
Sam and Dean glide into the room and close the oak paneled door behind them. They go up to the bed. Dean sits down on the velvet plushness of the mattress and waits one heartbeat. Then two. Then he reaches out his bloodstained hand and gently shakes Hill by the shoulder.

-Time to wake up, Dean says and his voice is deceptively sweet-sounding, a father by the bedside of a sick child. “Let the games begin.”


	24. Chapter 24

-I don’t know. Do you want to barter, Tiger? Dean asks looking over at Sam who is looming in the shadows at the end of the bed.   
-I want to pull out all his teeth with a pair of rusty pliers. Slowly.   
-What about mercy? Do you want to show mercy?   
-Pliers. Slow.

Hill is in a heap on the carpet in the middle of the room, well away from any panic buttons or weapons or intercoms. Without his suits he’s just a balding middle-aged slightly pudgy short guy in striped pajamas. He tried screaming for help but shut up when no one came running. He tried threatening, but then Sam turned on the bedside lamp and he got a good look at them dripping blood on his fine silk bed linens. There’s been some whimpering. Some pleading. Some attempts at haggling. He’s gone quiet now.

-Look, Dean says to Hill, “we’re not going to tell you what you’ve been doing is wrong.”   
-Greed is an ugly motivator, Sam adds calmly.   
-We’ve thought of many ways to kill you.   
-Throw you in the arena. Lock you in with the beasts. Bury you alive.  
-Slow deaths, Dean tells the man.

Not much of a man now. Not much of anything.

-But the truth is, Dean says and stands up moving so he’s about three steps away from Hill, “you’re not worth all that effort.”

Dean pulls the gun, aims it. Sam steps up behind him, molds to his back and parallels his arm with Dean’s, folds his grip around Dean’s, aligns their trigger fingers.

-We took your money, Sam says. “Wrecked your network. Stole your contact list. We’re going to burn down your house.”   
-And keep my promise, Dean finishes.

And then they pull the trigger.   
Because that’s what they do.

They stand there for a while, watching blood and brain matter seep into the carpet.

Just a man. Just a small, frail, breakable man voiding his bowls and his brains on the floor.   
  
Sam has the contact list. This little autocrat didn’t have the juice to do all this on his own. That’s okay, though, they’ll find his backers. They’ll bring it all down once they’re out.

Sam’s heart beats against Dean’s back. They’re breathing slow and in tandem.

Through the skylight the vague silver of stars reminds them that there is an out. There’s still a world out there. There’s still purpose, things to do.

Sam steps away and Dean turns around, nodding once.   
Time to go.


	25. Chapter 25

Seneca said “bad examples have away of recoiling on those who set them”.

There’s a scrabbling noise and a whine from a closet in the hallway. Dean slides the door open to find one of those cramped dog cages that made him itch long before this place. Pressed against the back he sees a sandy colored dog, not big enough to be full-grown yet. It’s making the most pitiable noise.

Sam leans in at Dean’s shoulder. He looks from the cage to Dean and then back to the cage.

They both know this is not a dog.

They both know which dog this is not.

The noise stops when Dean steps forward and unlatches the gate. There’s no way of misinterpreting the low crouch and hunched spine of the dog-that-is-not.

-Can you change? Dean asks.

Slow shake of the head.

Sam leans in and grabs the dog by the chin, forces eye contact.

-Stay quiet, stay behind us. Don’t make trouble.

And the dog nods.

The fleeting look Dean gives Sam when they turn to the exit is vaguely amused and Sam gives him half a smile. It’s not really funny. Nothing about this is funny.

This was the easy part. That’s the uncomfortable truth. From the basement to the top tier, slinking through corridors as death dealers and corrupting the surveillance is the easy part.

The hard part is getting out.

And they want out. They’ve been wanting out for months.

There’s the additional muted noise of paws padding along behind them now. It should make them nervous after so much time spent fighting things with teeth that wanted them dead. It doesn’t. Dean knows the kind of mercy he doled out was a double edged sword at best and the shifter behind them can be trusted at their back only because both he and Sam established themselves so thoroughly as the bigger meaner dogs.

They can’t be responsible for anyone else’s survival right now. Dean thinks the shifter knows that. At best this is a tactical alliance. Everything wants to live.

They can’t open the cages to things that would sink teeth into them. They can’t afford to leave behind those they have made enemies of.

There might be innocents in the building, but Dean doubts it.   
Tonight everyone will reap what they’ve sown.


	26. Chapter 26

Afterwards Sam always wonders how they made it out. He’ll pick it apart and look at it from every conceivable angle. He’ll think about every step he can remember and every adrenaline soaked move that he can’t. He knows he lost time here and there in the fugue of rage and fighting that he’ll never recover.

Somewhere in there they found boots. A bag full of cash. Weapons.

Somewhere in there a half-grown dog shifter gave a growl so vicious that the man pointing a gun at Dean staggered a step to the side and lost his aim.

There was a moment when Dean couldn’t stop hitting a guard, the fat bastard who had spat in their food and turned a cold water hose on Sam at full blast while smirking at them.

Sam remembers his gaze sticking on Dean, covered in gore, eyes burning with bloody wrath. He sees it in snapshots, slightly out of focus and viewed through a lens of red and brutal movement.

They went for stealth the whole way up to Hill. They go for the front door like a fifty ton elephant with road rage and rocket launchers.

Sam remembers his own wordless roar of fury, the animal too close to his skin and nothing between him and the blackout instinct of it. All that movement trained into him from when he was a child and all the practice they had been getting lately, it all coalesced into a ballet of blood and bones and bullets. He knows he growled, howled and snarled his way through all that combat before going completely silent and deadly with it.

And Dean, laughing.

Not in joy, not in delight, but laughing from the darkest part of himself, something incarnate in hell, that deepest region of the bloodshed that was always inevitable.

They opened doors. They flipped the deadbolts and the switches and set all the cats among the pigeons.

Those being held captive were given ways out, maps, keys, doors. Those trying to hold them captive were put down, by blade and bullet and broken neck.

Sam’s not even sure he wants to remember most of it, if he’s going to be completely honest. He’s seen some things in his time, he’s done some things, but this? This is just mayhem. Bedlam.

Pandemonium.

And they hobble away from the burning building at the end of it all with guns and knives and a duffel bag full of money and a limping shifter dog in their wake. So tired by then, all of them. So, so tired and spent and done and damaged.

The last leg is to the tree line and then they vanish into the gloom of a false dawn pushing shadows ahead of them and leaving flames behind.


	27. Chapter 27

When the FBI team arrive at the crime scene the first thing they notice is how quiet it is and how none of the police or firemen or rescue workers are really meeting their gazes.

There can be friction with the local LEOs, but this is different. The whole thing is too hushed to start with. There’s none of the bustle. There are no groups of uniforms standing around talking. There are no big in charge detectives and no chiefs coming toward them. There are no news crews, no gawkers.

It’s not the quiet of a child crime scene either. Not the strained professionalism necessary when dealing with human trafficking or something equally horrific.

In the overlay of burning and the stench of death there is something much more primitive lurking underneath. 

Fear.

There’s a clear and unmistakable vibe of deep, lowdown brute fear in the hush of voices, in the careful way everyone is moving. Like they are all walking through a minefield.

Tobyn, who is lead on this, has seen this before. Once in wartime when there was an actual live minefield and in peacetime when his team were scouring a major metropolitan area for a dirty bomb. This is that kind of quiet, tense and wary and oddly expectant.

Off to one side of the blown apart entrance doors the forensic team have pitched a big white tent and there are two humanoid shapes in hazmat suits picking over a lumpy dark shape like carrion crows. Tobyn doesn’t want to know what they’re looking at. He has a feeling this is going to be one of _those_ cases.

There is another team, a rough-looking guy and a short redhead, waiting with dogs. Cadaver dogs, rescue dogs, maybe both the way things are looking.

Through the doors and into the main building, then. Nothing else for it.

The building itself is some kind of gymnasium-industrial hybrid. He’s never seen anything like it. It’s got a lot of doors and strangely appointed rooms. It’s charred and blackened and probably structurally unsound at this point. It feels like everything is teetering just on the brink of falling down around their ears as they try to make a way forward with the biggest halogen flashlights they can find lighting their way.

It’s chaos.   
And deeper into the building, it’s carnage.

At one point Tobyn goes to turn left and the flashlight beam arcs across a wall showing him a splatter pattern placed high of something that can only be arterial spray from the body crumpled in a smoldering heap on the floor at their feet.

He gets stuck looking at it, the blood on the wall. It’s dotted and rainbowed through a smear of soot and dust. “Good god”, he thinks. “Mother of Mercy and all the saints.” The body is missing its head and there’s a strange looking ax buried so deep in the plaster it’s cracked the wall from floor to ceiling in a long line that looks like a bolt of lightning.


	28. Chapter 28

When they get out there are so many things wrong. Sam wasn’t expecting it, the quirk of having the most mundane things feel backwards awkward and filled with potential threats.

“Fuck”, he thinks to himself as he and his brother try to sit down in a diner. “Is this what Dean felt like when he came back? Is this what it was like for dad when he got back from the jungle?”

Because the flavor of wrong is new and overly bright and jagged like a sharp serrated knife being handed over to you blade first.

The sounds are too loud. Voices too, all that ruckus just for sitting and eating. The smells are more nice than not, making his stomach tie itself up thinking he’s only going to be taunted with something actually palatable that he then won’t be given unless he performs. The tired bench seat of the booth is soft and giving. They’re sitting so they can cover all exits. They’re both carrying too many weapons in public and Sam still palms the knife waiting rolled up with its companion fork in a green paper napkin.

It’s hard to focus, constantly trying to read the environment for danger. It’s almost impossible to talk to people, to interact. Dean still moves like something deadly and Sam is caught more than once watching the line of his shoulders, which is harder to read under the jacket he’s wearing than it was in a t-shirt.

They used to be able to move apart when they were walking down a street but now their shoulders brush with every step. Dean’s eyes are sprite bright and cold glittering. Sam’s still tiger eyed himself, looking for the next threat to come at them. He keeps forgetting to speak English when he talks to his brother.

Hair trigger defenses means nothing good to anyone who tries to come up to them, no matter how they can both read innocuous from ill intent.

At night they try a motel. Dean’s uneasy about the flimsiness of the door in a way he never was before. Sam can’t stand the fact that he has no line of sight on approaches. They try to sleep in separate beds. It doesn’t work. In the backseat of the jeep they’ve got parked out front a shifter dog is sleeping on top of a duffel bag full of blood money.

Their lives have always been messed up. They’ve always adapted and moved forward. They will have to do that now too. Sam just didn’t expect it to be so fucking hard.

They are two days away from that place and they are bruised and battered and very, very tired. They still can’t sleep.

The inventory of new scars and badly healed damage is impressive. Aches and pains that they couldn’t afford to pay attention to suddenly clamor at them. They have needs right now that are pretty acute, but they can’t tend to them when they’re both still on high alert.

Sometime in the dead of night Dean slides into Sam’s bed putting one hand on Sam’s back to let him know he’s there. He leans in and hums low, something sweet and familiar. Sam pushes into the touch and tells himself to relax. 

-Tomorrow we find somewhere to go, Dean tells him.   
-Today is tomorrow, Sam answers. 


	29. Chapter 29

They call him Shadow.

That’s okay with him. They haven’t really been properly introduced.

He has always had a thing for van Gogh’s painting _Almond Blossoms_. It’s about blossoming trees representing hope and awakening. It was painted to celebrate a birth. He liked that idea.

He has had some hopes himself, thinking about painting like he used to do, fingers smudged with coal from all the rough sketching he did when he wasn’t studying seriously. Because, really, being an artist in this day and age when everyone just buys cheap posters to stick on their walls… yeah, that wasn’t going anywhere.

He was hoping, though, that maybe, if he was very lucky, he could have a day job and then paint on his own time. He would have liked that.

He had a girlfriend, kind of. Not sure if she’s still around. Not sure if he can go back to school, either. His roommate has probably boxed up all his stuff and rented out the room by now. His family is long gone. His friends… yeah, he doesn’t want to think too much about what his friends think.

He’s Alice down the rabbit hole. Neo taking the red pill. He’s one of those kids on a milk carton.

He’s always known there is more to life than most people see, but then he would, wouldn’t he? He just never thought something like this was possible.

The men. The … the men who have him, not the ones that took him, not the ones that tried to make him _do_ things, they’re nothing he could have imagined either.

He’s never seen anyone in real life that could fight like that. Like a game. Like a movie. Like something out of the most incredible real life action fighting championship, only, with no one to call cut, or round, or game over.

He bared his throat. He’s never done that before.

He should feel violated, he knows. He took a champion fucking and he went ass up in the most public way. He wishes he could explain how he could do that and still follow behind these two like a loyal. It’s … he’s never put much stock in things like instinct and nature and animal traits, because if you ask him, people are just as riddled with all those things.

The way in which he’s different, though, is pretty obvious.

He should be horrified and traumatized and scared, and he is all those things, he is.

But it’s not about _them_. 

They are bigger than he is. They are stronger, god, so much stronger. They are merciless killers and more dangerous than anything he’s ever met.

And he has never felt as safe as he does laying in the backseat of the car they stole as they drive away from that place. 


	30. Chapter 30

The weird thing is that Dean’s almost free of nightmares of Hell now.

No, that’s not the weird thing. It’s there on the list of the very many weird things he lives with. Maybe in the top ten. Maybe even in the top five.

He remembers waking up from those nightmares the few times he managed to grab a couple of precious hours of sleep, newly brought back and held together by spit, cheap whiskey and fear. He remembers the fucking angel sitting at his bedside, watching over him, just like momma always said they were. Only… it wasn’t a good feeling.

He had felt dirty.

Poor Lazarus, ineffectually resurrected and badly assembled. Underneath the fear and the instinctual flinch at finding eyes on him when he was so skinless raw, there had been the kind of rage that levels towns and bathes the land in blood. The angel who’s handprint he bore didn’t make him feel better. The angel that had raised him up had that quality of all beings with that much time and power behind them, a kind of glazed over indifference, the sense that there was nothing particularly interesting about the pain of the butcher’s apprentice in all his wretched humanity. Angels lack compassion. The thing they have instead is made of faith in a bigger plan and a much longer timeframe. It had made Dean so angry.

Sam had been something else back then too, roided up on demon juice and dangerously unhinged in all his conviction. Dean had felt like his brother looked at him with the kind of grimy compassion that only someone weak and feeble deserves.

Still they hobbled forward and he faked it well enough to fool a casual passerby.

Now, though… there’s been a watershed. A line he’s crossed. Re-crossed. Crossed over. Something that makes him whole in his skin again. Finding that in the least likely of places isn’t all that surprising, really. That’s what it’s like for him. 

The things that should comfort him don’t and the things that shouldn’t do. 

The scent of his brother’s sweat, his brother’s hands red with the shed blood of their enemies, the feel of a good weapon in his hands - those things are a comfort.

The fact that he has proved he can still run a game as hard as the one they just survived and come out on top with money and weapons and a decent ride and brand new scars where there were none before. These scars fit him better, not like that awful handprint that only proves he was too unclean to touch without it causing lasting damage.

He’s a hunter again. More than he was before. And Sam is at his side where he belongs.   
Sam is more solid at his side than he has been for a while. Less guilt ridden. Less conflicted about it.

They’ll work on the other things. The proximity and distance thing. The way Dean’s gaze keeps drifting to Sam with the regularity of a metronome. The way his muscles tighten up when he can’t lay eyes on him. The way he can’t find sleep if he can’t feel Sam under his palm. The way all this is not at all new, not really. It’s more like they slipped back in time and he’s back where they were as wild things in the earliest days of his memories with Sammy baby smell in his nostrils and the thump-thump of two hearts beating against each other skin to skin.


	31. Chapter 31

There are people they could call for help.

They don’t.

There’s something tricky going on there. Sam thinks the thick seethe of resentment churning in him when he thinks about the people they could contact has something to do with the fact that no one came for them.

He knows they’ve skirted the line on what is okay, delivering results at the kind of high cost that has made hunters come after them more than once. Roy and Walt. Gordon. Dad. That one still stings, but it wasn’t as unreasonable as it looked at the time. Except for putting that on Dean’s head. Sam’s still not okay with that.

Someone could have looked for them. Someone could have cared.

Sam goes down the list in his head.

He comes to the not entirely surprising conclusion that there is no one he can trust to actually bust down doors and come in guns blazing - except his brother.

He already kind of knew that.

He figured that Dean was better liked, though. Someone could have cared about Dean, at least. Then again, with the script burned into their bones and the way Dean pulls guns on people these days, maybe they’re past that point.

There’s a reason why they’ve shifted from hunters to legends. A legend is always more. If they started out just good they became something else along the way, story material. Rumor fodder.

Maybe there really is no point in thinking anyone else is ever going to care enough to come looking.

Sam is surprisingly okay with that too. It’s probably a little of Tiger still living in his skin. Him and his brother on white sand, trying to not get killed. In bad moments that feels like all it ever is, an eternity of trying to not get themselves killed.

This is not despair, or fatalism, or fatigue. He’s battle weary, but that’s to be expected. It doesn’t feel like it will last.

They’ll heal up and make plans and feed themselves fresh meat and vegetables and … peaches. He’s had dreams of ripe peaches. No doubt they’ll get riotously drunk at least once and spend a little time laughing and maudlin and mad as hatters howling at the moon.

Then they’ll get to work. 

People are predictable. If there’s one guy dreaming of colonizing Mars, there’s one guy dreaming of gladiators. And if there’s one guy dreaming of blood spilled on white sand, there are thousands out there hungry to watch. Someone will make money off things like that. Someone, somewhere, will die with Dean’s blade in their neck. Hill wasn’t nearly enough. 

Probably better he and Dean do this on their own. 


	32. Chapter 32

There are rumors. There always are with these kinds of things. Secret things. Forbidden things. Places you can go to have every fantasy fulfilled, every whim catered to. The dark side of Vegas stuff. Pretty girls. Pretty boys. Drugs. Scenes. Violence. All the exotics.

And when you’ve seen all that, when you’ve done all that, there’s something else – a deeper, darker call to answer. It’s offered by men with slick smiles and hard eyes. It’s propositioned to you with promises of things you’ve never seen, things you’ve not become jaded to, unlike the silver shining nubile bodies or the headiness of drugs so smooth they even out the world and make even the night breeze sing in color.

It will cost you. The best things always do, but that’s what money is for. That’s what you do when you’ve bought all the yachts and cars and girls and boys and drugs and thunder you can. It’s not excess, you tell yourself. It’s _experience_. That’s what you’re chasing now, something _new_. Something _exciting_.

You’ve never had much time for fairytales or horror stories. Nothing to win there, nothing to conquer, not like making billion dollar deals and celebrating in the champagne room with five others that are just like you and trade girls and boys and drugs and toys between you.

You want it all to be bigger. Shinier. More. So you pay. Just to see.

You think it’s probably a scam anyway, and they’ll be sorry for sticking peacock feathers up a duck’s ass to sell it to you as a firebird.

The first time you go you see a man with a whip made of chains fight something that looks like a cross between a bear and an orangutan. Testosterone heavy in the air, the slick of arousal and blood lust and carnage. Even the best drugs you’d ever had never flew you as high as that does.

It becomes a fascination, an addiction unlike anything else.

The men with the sharp suits and slick smiles take your money and require your signature and put you on a list and you get access to live video feed, better than any porn. You watch all the time when you’re not there in person. And then they offer you something else, something more.

The Killing Blow.

They’re usually broken and chained down when you step into that room with a weapon in your hand. It makes your heart beat harder every time. It makes you feel real and invincible and so much better than everyone around you and their boring little lives. It makes you feel like gold could pour from your fingertips at your command and you own everything, all of it there for your taking to do with as you please.

And then, one day, the lights go out. Your playpen, the kingdom, the Arena, is burned down to the ground. 

As you sit there, in your million dollar office, with its billion dollar view, you have the most particular feeling that all the money in the world won’t help you pay the bill that is about to come due. Though maybe you should have guessed that when they made you sign the paperwork in blood. 


	33. Chapter 33

There are two boys sitting in the corner of the diner. That booth where Joey always sits when he comes in, at least since he came back. He used to sit up at the counter, chatting with Lou about cars and girls and baseball, but these days it’s like it itches at him sitting there.

“Boys” is maybe not the right word for them, just like it’s not right for Joe, but old habits are hard to break and Joey’s been her boy ever since he was fourteen and bussing tables all summer long to buy himself a bike so he wouldn’t have to ride the bus to school no more.

They got that same lean hungry look about them too. When she looks them over she sees work shirts and good sturdy boots and the ease of movement that comes from being at home in your body and used to making it do for you. She’s seen that on lots of men. She saw it more before the factory shut down. She sees it on the deputies they get in here at the end and beginning of shifts. She knows that means these are young men used to stepping up if something needs doing.

She’s always had a soft spot for boys like that. Young men like that.

Oh, she ain’t Verna. She won’t call them “honey” or “sweetheart”. Verna always did do that to make sure the tips are good, but she doesn’t need to. She can read mean from poor from well-mannered without having to exchange words. These boys she’ll bet will put down fifteen percent without blinking, even if they get the dregs of the coffee pot. She’s just going to make sure they get the first cups out of the new one. Dregs can go in the sink for once.

She’ll bet there are them that would think these boys are no good, but that’s not what she sees. She can tell, too, that if there was trouble, if Charlie came in raging drunk and hollering his damned fool head off, they’d both be out of their seats and making sure to gently put him back outside. They wouldn’t fuss, these two. They wouldn’t insist on calling the sheriff or be overly rough with him, either. They’d just take him outside. Maybe bring him a cup of coffee and a sandwich if his hands were shaking bad.

That doesn’t mean she can’t see they could be dangerous and not in the twitchy way Joey is now that the army is done with him. No. There’s nothing nervous about the way they are. There is something, though. If she was to try to put a word to it she’d say “watchful”. Like good cattle dogs.

Now, see, cattle dogs they are shepherds. They’ll stare down a wide-eyed bull and walk on the backs of the cows that would kick them. They’re smarter than most dogs too, especially the ones that have good eye. That’s what these two are like, watching everything around them with good eye.

She takes the fresh pot from the plate and walks over with the steady gait of someone who wants people to hear her coming. She knows she wouldn’t startle them anyway, both of them aware of her, of every breathing, moving body in the room. Both their cups are already flipped over, menus stacked back in the holder by the window. As she says “good morning, gentlemen” and asks if they know what they want, she watches their eyes as they look on her. They watch her hands, her eyes, her smile. They watch the way she puts the pot down and fishes her pad out of her pocket. They watch as she writes and then picks the pot back up.

No, it’s not nervous at all, the way they look on the world. It’s like the way her mother used to watch all her siblings playing together by the river. It’s like shepherds.


	34. Chapter 34

There is a whole host of things that set him off now. It’s been like this before. After The Pit, after learning there, he was seriously fucked up. Even then, even through all that, he had to try and keep it together. For Sam.

There have been hunts in the past that left him with strange new afflictions, things he listened for that he hadn’t paid attention to before, scents and sights that never bothered him suddenly became stark and impossible. He can’t stand it, being neurotic about shit, getting all shaky and sweaty-palmed. It makes him irrationally angry. And that, in turn, pisses him off.

On a good day, not that they have many of those, but on a good day, they can pass for normal. They can even bullshit each other that they’re okay, just putting one foot in front of the other and carrying on.

Like you do.   
Carry on and on.

So, this thing, it’s not really like he’s never had this before. He’s listening for new noises now, the slight whistling in the air of a blade coming at you at speed. The slither of scaly things. The scrape of claws in sand. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, getting inured to life in a cage in a basement with all that that entails.

And he can’t sleep now without Sam in his bed, which is fucking annoying.

Trust has never been easy. He could maybe count on one hand the number of people he’s ever trusted and still have fingers left over. Now it’s down to the wire. Him and Sam. That’s all there is left.

His trust in Sam now is subtly different. Somewhere in that trust there’s something a little darker and uglier than before. He trusts Sam to not only have his back, but to take his head if he turns. He trust Sam to stitch him up or to make him bleed if he has to. He trusts his little brother to clasp him close if he’s too fucked up and concussed to stand and he trust Sam to hold down a weaker opponent while Dean does what he has to. He trusts that survival is a different thing to them now than it ever was when their dad was around.

And he understands that they have left their father in the dust the same way they’ve left their mother in flames. All that is soot and ashes. It has been, in truth, since he came back from the Pit. Now it’s all the more real.

Grain to grain they’ve built this thing between them now so that there’s nothing left to break or burn or bleed that they can’t walk through together without ending up hating each other for it. And let’s face it, that was always a risk. Loving someone like he loves his brother has too much in it for there not to be a clear and present danger that it could turn to hatred. Or that that hatred could turn inwards for what that love can do. He’s been there too before. Hell does that to you. Makes it hard to lie about things you know to be the kinds of truths no one ever speaks out loud.

He calls his little brother “Sammy” and watches the way Sam’s eyes do something beautiful and complicated, flooding with the knowledge of what they are to each other, what they’ve lost and what they’ve gained in return. The price has been so fucking high they’re going to have to make it worth it. 


	35. Chapter 35

Sam is sucking absentmindedly on his finger. He’s got a splinter and it’s irritating the hell out of him. It hurts. He’s been trying to get at it for a while and he’s got this twisty achy feeling which is … just really maddening.

And suddenly the whole house of cards just tumbles down around him.

He’s sitting there, in the shotgun seat, all scowl and aggravation, thinking about how much it hurts and then he’s laughing. No, not just laughing, he’s howling with laughter. Like a hyena. Dean’s looking at him like he’s lost his ever-loving mind. The expression Dean gives him says so very clearly “what the fuck?” that it only makes it worse.

Sam is leaning forwards over his own knees and wheezing with the kind of hiccupping helpless laughter that is right next door to insane cackling and hysterics. He can’t even get enough air to explain. It doesn’t really matter in the end because his laugh drags Dean along with it and then Dean’s right there with him and they’re both lost and making the kinds of giggling snorting noises that are too undignified to ever make in front of anyone but your brother.

Your brother who has seen you at your worst and at your best. Has seen you bloodied and beaten down and triumphant and scared and joyous and powerful and filthy and broken.

And… well. This was bound to happen sooner or later.

They laugh until they run out of air and their stomach muscles ache. Then they climb out of the car and go sit on the hood for a while.

The car is the wrong shape, too boxy, too square, but that’s all right for now. Sam would not admit it under torture, but he kind of likes it. Not enough that he’s going to say anything about it to Dean, who is already looking forward to going to get their car. Sam thinks he might have said something if Dean hadn’t said that. _Their_ car.

This shouldn’t be funny and if you look at it from what you might call a normal perspective it probably isn’t, but the fact is Sam just lost it because he’s got aches and pains and sprains and he’s still pissing blood from the last fight and that thing with the splinter is just … insignificant. Petty, paltry pain. Not even pain, just… and he doesn’t want to think of it as metaphorical. It isn’t. Life isn’t like that, life isn’t the least bit about metaphor.

The sky is pale grey and dotted with clouds. They can’t really see any stars yet but Dean’s shoulder is against his and Dean’s sitting with his head back, hands in his lap, one leg cocked and he’s relaxed. It’s not a boneless sprawl and all the awareness is still there, but overall the feeling of having taken a deep breath and released some of the lingering tension is good. Healthy, even.

Sam tucks his finger back into his mouth to try and get that infuriating splinter out. Dean gives him an amused side-glance and says nothing.

They’re too young to be this battle-scarred and tried. They’re too young to have walked through so many fires and seen so many bleached bones. They’re too young to be this old, Sam thinks with his gaze directed towards the sky where the stars are just starting to come out.


	36. Chapter 36

The first hunt they take is an unmitigated disaster and a rousing success, depending on perspective.

They’re still cleaning house, doing research on corrupt politicians and bent police, but that’s more of a hobby than anything else. It’s slow burning, the settling of scores. Leaving things up to the powers that be isn’t really their way. Marshalling their resourses, that they are good at.

They still have a day job and that’s where the hunting comes in. The world doesn’t stop turning just because they’ve been out of play for a while. There are still monsters. More than before, actually. Bigger. Meaner.

Dean takes one look at the papers and says “werewolf” and Sam just nods. They both know where the heart goes when it goes missing like that.

Tracking is easy. Catching it is easy as breathing.

The rousing success part is all about that, which goes slick and fast.

The unmitigated disaster is something they only deal with when they’re back at the motel and Sam is washing blood out of his hair. Dean stands at the sink with his arms folded across his chest when Sam gets out, wrapping a towel around his waist. Sam meets his gaze and he can see the troubled words crowding up there, a slowly building thunderstorm.

They were doing so well. At least they thought they were.

Sam shrugs. Dean hikes an eyebrow and shakes his head. Sam steps up to him and puts a hand to the bruise on Dean’s shoulder. Dean lets him feel it out. It’s not bad. It’s below the scar and it’s not like his joint aches more than usual.

The thing is, the hunt is something that’s always had a particular meaning for them. It’s in the inscrutable things, more of a scent than a feeling, more of a directional intent than an actual goal. So Dean knows as well as Sam that what they did tonight was no longer those things.

What they were doing was looking for conflict - and finding it.

You don’t brawl with werewolves. You don’t go into the woods at night if you’re not ready for a big surprise. You don’t tag team a kill like that, hand to hand without weapons.

Or you don’t do that if you’re a hunter and expect to survive.   
Only, they can. They will. They have.

They’re unsubtly ruthless and half wild right beneath their skins. They have turned into those things. Or maybe reverted back to them. Hard to tell.

-Jesus-fucking-Christ, Dean, Sam says low and oddly mellow.   
-Yeah, I know.

Sam means “what have we become?” and Dean wishes he had a clear answer. All he can think is “… now we are dangerous”.


	37. Chapter 37

Dean tries to hook up exactly once after … everything.

They’re in a little nothing town on the outskirts of a much bigger one, hunting down a lead on one of the arena backers. Dean’s at a bar.

She’s all kinds of lovely, long chestnut hair and dancer’s legs, hips moving in sea waves and slow rolls as she glitters on the dance floor. Her perfume carries a sweet high note, her skin is supple and soft. Her lean across the bar as she orders water is a calculated showcase and the open look she gives him is mostly invitation.

It doesn’t stop the whispers in Dean’s head. Alastair’s sibilant cold tone telling him how useless he is, how used up, what he’s good for and all he’s good for. The smug voice of Hill telling him he’d be selling him and Sam no matter what Dean threatened. Things from farther back in time that he never thinks of, that he hasn’t thought about in years, in decades, in eons.

Looking down to see his hands on her waist, his palms nested snugly on the flare of her hipbones, all he can see is how much damage those hands have wrought, how much bigger he is, how much stronger. Those things all used to make him feel protective, oddly grateful that someone would trust him that close, a stranger who could be anyone, anything, let in close to a beating heart and so many fragile bones, so much easily bruised skin.

He used to fall to worship so effortlessly. A woman’s body never something he took for granted, her unreasonable faith that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he would make her feel good, leave her sated and anchored in the physical without doing harm. Sacred and profane, the one night he would have with her on the understanding that he couldn’t be anything more and she’d still let him, just that one night. It was a respite and a comfort and more religion than Dean got anywhere else.

Now he looks at his own hands and he knows too much about anatomy to ever be comfortable like that again, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he really doesn’t trust himself.

He doesn’t trust himself to not do damage.

That’s the one thing he always knew he could count on before. No matter what other shit was going on in his life, what shadows were haunting him, what bloodshed came before or after that one night, he knew with bone deep certainty that he’d never, ever injure like that.

So he smiles at her and kisses her as sweetly as he can manage and then pushes her body away from his own with careful gentle pressure. There’s confusion in her eyes, they were halfway out the door at that point and she’s so lovely, so open to him. He doesn’t trust his hands, his teeth, his instincts. He doesn’t trust himself to be able to navigate the fucked-up maze of his own mind, his experiences.

He goes back to the motel room he shares with his brother and when Sam looks up at him from the laptop screen he meets his gaze squarely and doesn’t try to deflect or explain or rationalize or draw away. Sam understands in ways no one else could ever hope to. Jessica, Ruby, The Sands, the demons that have taunted them both. Sam knows Dean’s hands and the mess in his head. And Sam is the only one who doesn’t, wouldn’t, shy away from any of it because he carries his own scars and mess and jumble and they’re not dangerous to each other the way they are to the rest of the world. 


	38. Chapter 38

When they were kids their world was always strangely insular.

Dad was there, sure. Sometimes there were others, hunters mainly, like Bobby or Caleb. Sometimes there were well-meaning teachers and neighbors. Sometimes there were other kids, friendships formed in that pebble skipping random way of knowing they could be here today and gone tomorrow, the Chevy kicking up dust with a growl.

At the core of things, though, it was always just them.

Long sticky drives in the heat sitting with their feet tangled making up words and signs that created a whole complex system of communication. Odd games of cards and bottle caps mixed together in amalgams that made less than no sense to the grownups around them. Physical contact in scratches and kicks and punches. Sleep crowded in origami folds of arms and legs and stolen blankets.

Most of their world then was a balance of not enough and too much. Empty stomachs and lean hearts. That’s probably never really changed.

Even when they pushed back against it, there was still heat at the core of it, the steady warmth of that connection enough to be home.

It’s always seemed that when outside forces try for them, they always cut at that. Maybe not at first, but sooner or later, everything they hunt, everyone they fight, always tries to hack at that bond. It looks like a weakness. Could be one. In a lot of ways it is.

That used to be more of a problem than it is now.

What you hold closest to your heart you protect the most fiercely. That’s maybe an academic exercise for most people - but not for them. If they leave it unspoken it’s not because they can’t talk about it, it’s just that the words aren’t made up of things other people understand. It’s like that game of cards and bottle caps - some of it spoken in a brutal shove, some in Latin and some in fixing the perfect cup of coffee and handing it over without missing a beat or even making eye contact.

It’s a given, then, that most of what they are gets lost in translation and what people see when they look at them is whatever they can fit into their preexisting notions. “Brother” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Neither does a punch in the shoulder, a fresh clip for an empty gun or the low hum of _Hey Jude_ as a lullaby.

Every time someone, something, pushes at them they push back twice as hard. And every time that happens the connection just goes deeper, roots setting down harder and spreading wider, branching out in new and unexpected directions.

It isn’t narrow, this thing between them. Not shallow. It never was. It isn’t just a thread of commonality and genetics. It is a deep, wide and well-nourished thing with a lot of morphological growth. There is something to fear there, for those that try against them, because when it comes right down to it, their biggest weakness is always going to be their greatest strength. 


	39. Chapter 39

Morocco is still their most successful hold. There’s tradition there, in the sand, on the sand.

The Arenas have been around since The Beginning. Gladiatorial games, dogfights and pit fights and brutal executions are all a part of the plan. Most of the fighters are just chum for the beasts.

The problem with time as it passes in the human plane is that is so short, so fleeting. They can shift dimension and slip through states of being, but there is no accounting for how human time seems to slide by when they are looking in the other direction.

In the hierarchy of Hell there are some that command and some that follow and some that sow discord and dissent. Whoever holds the Crown, whoever is the King, he has a part to play just like the rest of them. He has more of the pieces, more of the plan, but the crown can still wobble on his head.

So when he finds out that though they are successful in Morocco and Krasnoyarsk and Am Timan, they forgot to look other places and somehow missed that they had two in their grasp that they have been hunting for years…

Some humans are special, meant for a certain purpose, a certain role or a specific sacrifice. When the time comes to pick up the skulls and make the circle, they are to be in their place or the whole order of things will come unbalanced, meaning losses that can not be easily regained.

The King is not well pleased.   
He rages and a storm of pain and blood rains down on them all.

Instead of unbalancing the brothers, they made them stronger. Instead of breaking them and throwing their bones for the dogs to gnaw on, they put them through almost six months of the kind of intensive preparation that makes every least little bit of division they managed to forge between them completely worthless.

They made them stronger.   
That was not their intention.

The angels have no hand in this, other than giving the brothers bone-runes to hide them from sight. That was unusually sly of the feathered things. The demons sent to skulk around did not see them either, eyes blinded by devil’s traps and other ancient protection.

They had them in their grasp. They had them pinned down and vulnerable. They had them in cages in a basement and still they could not hold them, keep them. Break them.

The King’s rage is enough to over cloud his joy at leaving a gate open long enough to loose some of his best, his most insidious, on the rest of humanity.

The Winchester brothers have always been important in the flow of fate, they have specific roles, a specific purpose. They were never meant to be this strong when the flood of fate reached them. They were never meant to be united this way. And now there will be hell to pay.


	40. Chapter 40

In Arizona a tweaker breaks into their motel room in the predawn hours, desperation in his eyes barely having enough time to switch to surprise before he’s flat on the floor with Dean’s booted foot at his neck cutting off the beginning of his startled scream.

In a rough bar at the outskirts of smalltown nowhere Georgia posturing turns into intent turns into violence turns into motion and Sam breaks both arms of the biker trying to smash a bottle over Dean’s head from behind.

Outside Mobile, Alabama the inflectionless voice of the angel tethered to them by high decree gains an oddly baffled quality when his questions and call to arms aren’t answered by anything more than twinned expressions of flat disinterest.

Four states and hours of tread on the tires worn down and an old hunter contact watches as the two Winchester boys have a whole conversation without ever uttering a word. They’ve always been like well-timed pistons, those two, but there’s always been a push and pull between them. Now there’s nothing like even a sigh of a drag in the way they eerily turn, like mirrors of each other.

At the low end of a graveyard in muggy Louisiana heat, pink and purple wisteria blooming all around, ghosts leave them untouched, flickering out like firebugs fading on the ascent.

They don’t know, probably never will, but Shadow paints like a man possessed. Violence and carnage and blood sprayed red on white sand. The canvasses make onlookers weave on their feet, shifting uncomfortably, small motions of flight that can’t be contained and gazes gliding down and left and away. Shadow paints scarred hands gripping skin and even though these images are just as unsettling, just as drenched in violence, there is tenderness in the press of flesh and gratitude, gratitude, gratitude in every stroke of the brush.

What Dean begins in Latin, Sam finishes in Aramaic as a demon tries it on for size wearing a little sweetling of a girl to trap them in sin. In the young thing’s skin the dirty power is older than dirt and the stolen vocal chords make the jeering taunts sound even more perverted. It tries to drag out Dean, the butcher’s apprentice, to remind him he is not a good man. Sam’s voice is thunder, is crackling lighting, is calm when he tells it where to go and Dean’s parting words are not at all heartening. “ _Give the Hierarchy my regards_ ”. That is a threat. As it feels the inexorable drag downwards it thinks “wasn’t he meant to be broken?”

Outside a Wal-Mart in the corner of the parking lot with her hand painted begging sign propped in front of her, she sings. Two kids and no means. Twenty years old and feeling forty, ragged sleeves pulled down over her aching, dried out knuckles, skin cracking and bleeding. A “food insecure home”, they said. “Nothing we can do”, they said. Her voice lifts though she’s tired, bone-weary, peeled and whittled down to nothing. A lullaby for her aching bones, then. “Take a sad song and make it better” and if she could pray this would be her _kyrie, eleison_ , her eyes close for a second against the stinging wind. Boots scuff and she won’t open her eyes for the clink of coin, not this time, not for what won’t be enough to feed her sons. Soft tread away from her and she heard the shift of cloth, heard movement, almost expected to be kicked, slapped, beaten. When she does open her eyes a fat roll of bills, enough for a year, has been tucked neatly under her left knee with a touch so light she never even felt it.

Three very wealthy and influential men die three very sticky and violent deaths. One of them is a police commissioner. One of them is a senator. One of them is a millionaire. All of them were bastards.

Dean watches his hand. It’s the dead of night, neon lit and washed out impossible skin under the weight of his palm where it rests innocuously riding his little brother’s sleeping breaths. Sam’s shirtless and scarred and strong. Supple latissimus dorsi. The valley and ridged speaks of the vertebral column. Dean’s hand, that has wrought so much damage, drawn so much blood, lies there, fingers splayed, inert and harmless. Sam is sleeping on his stomach under Dean’s touch, head turned away into the pillow. Unselfconsciously trusting. There’s power in absolutes and Dean will never harm his brother. He can trust himself in that knowledge. That knowledge draws a prickle over his own skin like static electricity.

Sam stands at Dean’s side, their shoulders slightly overlapping. He’s stood here a thousand times. He’s stood here in his brother’s protection since he was old enough to walk. The inference has changed. It used to mean shelter. It still does, but now it also means defense. Battle. Heart to my brother’s keeper. Light to the shade of violence. Things listed in myth, in legend. There are some gods that favor hunters. Sam thinks about that sometimes, when angels and demons get too involved in their business. Neith, goddess of war and the hunt. Artemis. Apollo’s twin, Diana. Ogun. Mixcoatl. Wonders what they would make of an offering of a party sized bag of peanut M&M’s and a bottle of spiced rum. He thinks about legends of brothers and the resentment born of being stuck in a cage like a brute beast.

They are a lot of things at this point. Brute beasts and sophisticated artisan hunters. Cold steel wielders. Charm weavers, spell casters. The kindness of strangers and the honed dagger of coldly calculated revenge.

They’ve tamed things with magic tricks and stared into yellow eyes and they may just be the kings of all wild things. That’s what happens when fate and fortune get poured into the maelstrom of chance and someone, somewhere starts playing gladiatorial games without remembering that sometimes the things in the cages find a way out.

They are only as dangerous as they need to be.   
And they still have work to do.

 

END


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